The High West Bourye 2017 Limited Edition

750 ml kinetically inclined liquid in a bottle

Tasting notes:Imagine a seaside boardwalk in some alternate universe in which the New Jersey coastline is nice. There’s peppermint cotton candy and peanut shells, but also a pair of latex gloves from a dental office (it is an alternative universe, but it’s also still New Jersey). There’s also a stand hawking slowly caramelized cherries (it’s Jersey, so it’s called “Bada BING!”), the side of which has a few wet newspapers slapped up against its side. There’s also a Bourbon smell alongside a rye smell, says Captain Obvious (thanks, Bill!). And in another cleaned up callback to the Jersey of the 70s, there’s a note of Sriracha butter that could possibly be radioactive butter instead (but, come on, it’s butter! Not like it’s a used syringe…).

The mouth is all Wow, Zoom, Pow! It’s an Adam West Batman fight that goes on for eight campy minutes (to the delight of the Jersey “muscle” watching it). It’s drying, but sweet, with notes of sage and tarragon. Though it’s a bit of a quick passage on the mouth, what flavor! It’s spiked with rosemary and rosewater and rooibos tea, all sitting anomalously alongside a spread of luncheon meat.

The finish continues the spikiness, but elevates itself to kinetic, and even fully acrobatic–all while being simultaneously rangey and herby. It’s Herbie the Love Bug, set in…you guessed it…in New Jersey (but the good, alternate universe one). Somewhere along the way, Herbie got a couple of cool kids together in an abandoned ashram. The result: a coconut “hybridized” with a dandelion green. Truly a love child worth identifying as such.

Rating:

On the scale of alternative settings for famous films–The High West Bourye 2017 Limited Edition is setting The Terminator in New Jersey (the real one)–Some things would surely have gone differently: some of the chase scenes would’ve gone much more smoothly without L.A. traffic; fewer of the bystanders would have been so credulous, and the terminator played by Arnold Schwarzenegger might just have gotten his ass kicked before he ever found Sarah Connor.